David please do not misconstrue my post to mean that yours was not correct. I am just interested in presenting what we know for sure, what we suspect, and what we do not know in those terms when we give information to people. There was nothing wrong with your information.

While I talk with Gillison and others almost weekly, what I hear is far from the language of absolutes. Using her as one of many sources that I listen to, the most current conversation I had with her was about the hopes of eliminating radiation from HPV treatment some time in the future, as it has the longest term and most severe consequences to the patient, even to the point of producing its own radiation induced cancers. Chemo negatives come and go, but rads are for life. She acknowledges that we are very far from this, but it is a nice goal to shoot for. It will take money and science to show that we are capable of managing the disease to long-term resolution without the radiation. The better response of HPV positive tumors applies only to those which occur in neversmokers at this time, and that data is not really long term. We at least know for sure that tobacco and HPV are not synergistic in their interaction but the two are additive, a very different thing. This is undoubtedly adds a new sub group to the equation, ex smokers who are now HPV tumor patients. How they will skew the numbers and how we sift them out in an unbiased manner remains to be seen. Whether they also show this slight survival advantage is unknown as they are currently not being sifted out of the sub population by all concerned.

Also as Gail mentioned about the ND's, this is only occuring in multidiciplinary environments. You get a surgically oriented doctor etc. working with the patient first and it is part of his protocol before he passes them off to the radiation chemo guys... if he does.